Did your discarded Razr phone's texts and pictures make it into this book?

Dwight Silverma, Beaumont Enterprise

By Dwight Silverman

Updated 1:07 pm, Tuesday, November 27, 2012

FILE - In this file photograph taken Feb. 3, 2009, a pedestrian makes a call with his Motorola Razr cell phone in downtown Chicago. For decades, Motorola's products told the story of the march of electronics into the hands of consumers: car radios in the 1930s, TVs in the 1940s and cell phones in the 1980s.

Gather 'round, kiddies! Today's cautionary technology tale comes to you by way of Motorola, Amazon.com and Americans' propensity to unthinkingly throw their old stuff away.

BuzzFeed FWD reports on New York artist Kyle M.F. Williams, who sought out a bunch of old Motorola Razr flip phones, thinking he'd paste them on a scooter as part of a sculpture. He found the phones he wanted, but discovered a much more, um, intriguing use for them:

" On eBay, he found a lot of 44 Razr phones from a seller who appeared to be a electronics repair shop out of Texas being sold in "as-is" condition for only $89 total.

'I assumed they would all be broken, or wiped, but when I got them I found that half of them still had texts, sexts, pics, and vids. So I took a couple days and figured out how to dump all the content from the phones onto my computer," Williams told me. Using Amazon's print on demand publishing service, he is selling a paperback book out of the images, titled Razr."

Williams speculates that either the owners didn't know how to wipe the phones, or more likely they just didn't care. Maybe they thought the repair shop would thoughtfully wipe the phones for them.

I asked Williams via Twitter for more specifics about the "repair shop out of Texas", and he responded that the shop was located in Sugar Land. Yes, there's a possibility that information from your neighbor's Razr – hey, maybe even from your Razr – could be featured in the book.

Clearly, the moral of the story is: Before you discard or pass on personal technology, make sure your personal information is purged. That's fairly easy to do with smartphones, because they all have a "Reset phone" toggle in their settings. It may not be as easy on older, feature phones.

Interestingly, erasing a Razr flip phone isn't rocket science. The devices have a toggle in their settings called "Master Clear", according to this item at eHow:

" 1. Power on your Motorola phone and hit the 'Menu' button.

2. Choose 'Settings' from the menu.

3. Click on 'Initial Setup.'

4. Click on 'Master Clear.'

5. Type in your security code. If you haven't changed it, the default is '000000.'

6. Choose "Yes" when it asks you if you want to 'Clear All Phone Data.'"